What's the dumbest SEO mistake you ever made?

Beverly Level X³

June 22, 2016, 6:40 pm

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What's the dumbest SEO mistake you ever made?

Not like there are any good SEO mistakes, but at least some mistakes are learning lessons you can recover from. A dumb SEO mistake is one that puts your site out of commission, with no hope of recovery. For instance, think of eHow and their constant tendency to publish thin content. Remember how hard they got smacked during the first Panda algorithm update? Of course, that site has since recovered but it took countless years and revisions to the site to make it more relevant and dejunk all that spam and who can say if they are nearly as popular as before.

With that in mind, what's one really dumb SEO mistake that you made for your own sites or that you know of having been made on another site?

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MasterA

I have made some SEO mistakes in the past back when I first started a forum. I used those backlink generators to generate backlinks and buy those 10,000 blog comment backlinks. Thinking back, it was not only a waste of money but a big harm to my Google SERP although I hardly had any good rankings for my forum back then. I don’t think I got a Google Penalty but my forum hardly ranked because I didn’t know how to do search engine optimisation back then and just went for all the things that were advertised to me without doing deep research.

10 years ago

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TommyCarey

Oh man, I'm not going to just list one

Xrumer: I had xrumer on a dedicated server for years and sold profile links to clients. I not only sold to them, I used them myself. And since I had unlimited access to these links, I abused the hell out of them

I think I build over 300,000 profile links to one of my pages a long time ago and almost over night I was on page 10 for all of my keywords

Blog comments: Just like xrumer, I had unlimited access to blog comments since I owned scrapebox. I let it run overnight and made roughly 50,000 auto approved comments to my website and that was a horrible idea. I basically destroyed that site because I couldn't bring it back to the first page no matter what I did

Footer links: I was partnered up with a hosting company that offered free hosting but the person would have advertisements on their websites. My partner had over 400,000 websites and I was paying him $250 a month to get my dofollow link in the footer of all these free websites. Now this was way before I was doing SEO for myself and I didn't think this would hurt me. I was getting around 3,000 clicks a day on my ads, but no sales because all the websites I was advertising on weren't relevant to my niche. After about 5 months of advertising on all these websites I figured out it was only hurting my rankings, not helping them

Well, those are a few things I messed up in my early days of Online Marketing and SEO

I'm sure there are a lot more fun stories out there, let's hear them

- Razzy

10 years ago

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Lynne

Well I haven't made any big SEO mistakes as such, not things that damaged my websites. I am not a seller here, I am a buyer.

I started an online business in 2012 thinking as soon as I made a website it would be found online. I knew nothing about SEO or content writing... I just thought you know websites are found in Google.

Only by 2013 when my website wasn't really going anywhere at all did I first learn about installing an SEO plugin and then it took me another month of no organic hits to realize I actually had to SEO my pages and posts by entering the title, description and keywords.

It took me a while to learn a little bit more about keywords and that I can't just target "online baby store".

It took me years to figure things out properly.

10 years ago

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Everett

My mistake would involve "keyword stuffing". You know how you go to a website, view the page source and then see many keywords, like 500 keywords in the meta tags or somewhere on the page? This is one of my mistakes, but hey it seemed everyone was doing it so I followed them. Another mistake would be bounce rate, I use to think a large bounce rate indicated how long a person was on a website, but it actually meant how long it took the person clicked away from your website. So when you keyword stuff and have a large bounce rate it is definitely not good for SEO! Thankfully I have learned from my previous mistakes, and follow all whitehat SEO guidelines.. sort of.

10 years ago

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EliteWriter

There are many mistakes that are made either because of lack of knowledge or a complete urge to hopefully improve, only to end up possibly worse than before. I cannot say any personal stories as I do not have a site of my own. However I think that one of the biggest and most commonly made mistakes is copied content and keyword stuffing. Also titles tags and meta descriptions that are not unique, as well as irrelevant anchor text links, and links from sources that are not credible. And there is also the problem of focusing on the wrong keywords - that's very common and very damaging.

10 years ago

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Corzhens

I haven’t tried doing SEO methods for now because I have no website of my own. But with the dumb mistake perhaps it would be the stuffing of keywords. There is a tendency for a newcomer like me to include a multitude of keywords in the article that I’m sure it will be considered stuffing and probably the site will be sanctioned by Google.

8 years ago

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SEOClerks

What's the dumbest SEO mistake you ever made?

What's the dumbest SEO mistake you ever made?

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MasterA

TommyCarey

Lynne

Everett

EliteWriter

Corzhens

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